Translatio imperii and the Matter of Troy in Angevin Naples: BL Royal MS 20 D I and Royal MS 6 E IX

During his reign, Robert of Anjou (r. 1309-43) presided over the significant expansion of the royal library, a cultural practice that enhanced his self-fashioning as a Mediterranean ruler. In the bibliophile cultures of the Angevin book world, the siege of Troy and the Trojan diaspora provided a vehicle with which to express territorial imperatives. Two manuscripts produced in the 1330s evoke the matter of Troy as justification for the possible expansion of the Kingdom of Naples: British Library Royal MS 20 D I and Royal MS 6 E IX. The visual programmes in these two codices demonstrate the centrality of the matter of Troy to the territorial rhetoric of empire in late medieval cultures. Robert of Anjou, however, was more effective at imperial textual performance than the expansion of imperial territory, and traces of those textual performances endured long after Angevin ambitions had been extinguished.